Joe Biden left office with abysmal approval ratings — and faith that history would redeem him.
“It will take time to feel the full impact of all we’ve done together,” he said in a farewell speech. “But the seeds are planted, and they’ll grow and they’ll bloom for decades to come.”
In the meantime, there is the opinion of history professors — 17 of whom gathered last weekend at Princeton University to produce not a vindication, but something different: a first-cut scholarly evaluation of the Biden presidency.
Before the two-day gathering, the group had submitted essays on topics including immigration, foreign policy, the economy, media, political polarization and L.G.B.T.Q. rights. After revisions and editing, they will be published by Princeton University Press in about a year under the title “The Presidency of Joseph R. Biden: A First Historical Assessment.”
The group may have been looking backward, with a perspective often deep in the policy weeds. But there were plenty of nods at the chaotic first few weeks since the return of his bitter political antagonist, whose name seemed to come up almost as much as Mr. Biden’s.
“Donald Trump is the most consequential political figure of the 21st century, in the whole world,” Michael Kazin, a professor at Georgetown, who contributed an essay about the Biden administration and labor, said. “That’s both shocking, and something we’ve all gotten used to. In some ways, you could say Biden is a figure in the Trump era.”
The months since the election have brought bitter debate in Democratic circles about the failed Biden (then Harris) campaign. Julian Zelizer, a professor at Princeton and the event’s organizer, said the goal of the project was to rise above both Monday morning quarterbacking and old assumptions — including the idea that a two-term presidency is the norm.
The strength of Trumpism, he said, “changes the way we evaluate how Biden did what he did, and forces us to think about how to even measure political success and failures.”
The two-day discussion brought broad questions: How much do intentions, versus concrete, durable achievements, matter? How much do you view a policy record through the backlash it generated?
Also, amid shocking events like the Jan. 6 riot and Biden’s 11th-hour withdrawal from the race, how do you keep your partisan emotions out of it?
“Not surprisingly,” Kazin said wryly, “people mix their opinion of what they think should have happened with what really did happen.”
In November 2016, a group met to prepare a similar volume on the Obama presidency (following one dedicated to George W. Bush). That meeting took place a few days after Election Day, which had left the liberal-leaning group in state of shock at Trump’s victory, and some members wondering if they needed to revise their analysis of the previous eight years.
A gathering in March 2021 to evaluate the Trump presidency took place on Zoom, because of the pandemic, and included lots of questions about whether the Trump years were an aberration, or the beginning of a durable realignment.
Mr. Trump, it turned out, had opinions on the matter. After an article about the gathering appeared in this newspaper, an aide contacted Mr. Zelizer, saying the former president wanted to tell his side of the story.
The group met for an hour by videoconference with Mr. Trump that July (by coincidence, the day after a C-SPAN poll of historians deemed him the fourth-worst president in history). He ran through a list of “tremendous” successes on the economy, foreign policy and other areas, and was very much “in character,” Mr. Zelizer said, down to his prediction that the book would be “a No. 1 best seller.” (It was not.)
“I had the impression he was speaking in a way he thought historians would want to hear,” Mr. Zelizer said. “But the substance was very much the same.”
At last weekend’s gathering, there were warnings against seeing the Biden presidency as a failure, simply because Mr. Trump won the 2024 election and had begun dismantling his policies. Essays on subjects like environmental policy, the economy and race argued that Biden accomplished more than was often noted in the news media — or advertised by the administration itself.
“It’s easy to see it as a story of continually falling short,” said Joel Goldstein, a historian of the vice presidency at St. Louis University, who contributed a chapter about Kamala Harris. “But then you realize there was so much happening.”
There was plenty of talk of big-picture patterns. Was the Biden presidency the end of the federal civil rights era inaugurated by Lyndon B. Johnson? The last gasp of New Deal liberalism (or Clintonian neoliberalism)? An anomaly akin to the one-term Carter (or Van Buren) administration?
At the end of the first day, a group of four political scientists came as guests, armed with charts and graphs, along with some not-great news for Mr. Biden: Presidents who leave office with approval ratings below 50 percent (Mr. Biden departed at 40 percent) struggle to control how their place in history is understood.
They also raised the ways the Biden presidency — including in his approach to executive power, and his use of pardons — may have been more continuous with Trump than his champions want to acknowledge.
In his chapter for the book, about the Supreme Court, John Witt, a historian at Yale, made a similarly cheeky argument, suggesting that Mr. Biden used the court both as an antagonist and an “enabler.”
The court’s 2023 rulings outlawing affirmative action in college admissions and blocking Mr. Biden’s student debt relief plan may have been defeats for the Biden agenda. But they also had a “silver lining,” Mr. Witt said, in taking an issue that split the Democratic coalition off the table.
“I think it’s a pattern across all 20th-century presidents, and also Lincoln,” he said. “They found a way to navigate the court and use it to offload political costs.”
As for abortion, the political costs of overturning Roe v. Wade may not have fallen on Trump, as Democrats had hoped. But Mary Ziegler, a law professor at the University of California, Davis, who contributed a paper on reproductive rights, said that did not mean that the right had won the bigger fight.
“Social conservatives are acting like they have a mandate I don’t think they have,” she said.
In an essay on race, Khalil Gibran Muhammad, a professor of African American studies and public affairs at Princeton, offered a full-throated defense of Biden’s record as “the first equity president.”
Biden, he wrote, “staked his entire presidency on battling white supremacy and delivering justice to every American left behind,” spending significant political capital and billions of dollars on initiatives woven through 90 federal agencies.
They may have all been “outlawed” by Mr. Trump, he said. But in the history books, Mr. Muhammad noted, a president’s record on race is usually defined by ideals and intentions. If backlash were the sole measure of a legacy, “there would have been little to admire in the presidency of Abraham Lincoln.”
In the last hour of the gathering, discussion turned to the most shocking event of Mr. Biden’s presidency: his disastrous debate against Mr. Trump, followed by his decision to drop out of the race.
Here, things took a sharp turn to what Mr. Muhammad called “the land of speculation.” Who in the party knew what about Mr. Biden’s apparent cognitive decline, and when did they know it? Who in his inner circle was crucial to his decision to stay in it as long as he did?
Timothy Naftali, a research scholar at Columbia who wrote the essay on the resignation, wasn’t the only participant to drop the historian’s objectivity and confess to feeling emotional after the debate.
“I tried not to get into the issue of whether he was actually running the government, but I wanted to explain to myself why I felt so angry, instead of sad,” Mr. Naftali said.
“I wouldn’t say it was a Nixon-level cover-up,” he added, referring to Mr. Biden’s decline. “But there was concealment.”
Today, Mr. Biden’s withdrawal remains a raw topic for many. But by the time insider accounts and other sources that shed more light become available, Mr. Zelizer said, it may lose its emotional charge.
That partly depends, he said, on whether Mr. Trump’s return to office ends up being just another turn of American politics, or a blow to the democratic system itself.
“The promise of Biden, for his supporters, was to get rid of the element of politics that Trump represented,” Mr. Zelizer said. “Not only did he not do that, but it’s not a successor to Trump that wins the election — it’s Trump.”
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